Miss Nancy Luce, a Vineyard perspective

Review, by Samantha Barrow, in Edible Vineyard

mailto:http://www.ediblevineyard.com/index.php/stories/article/nancy_luce

Poultry Science, Chicken Culture: A Partial Alphabet

Poetic, spiritual, agricultural, biological and otherwise, Dr. Susan Merrill Squier’s book, Poultry Science, Chicken Culture; A Partial Alphabet, is the perfect primer to explore the relationship between chickens and human animals. Literally. It is organized as an abecedarium that is often associated with children’s primers because it allows for a beginner’s systematic approach to a body of knowledge. Her first chapter begins with A, for Augury, the second with B, for Biology and so on up til I, for Inauguration, before ending with the conclusion, Zen of the Hen. Because of the book’s sturdy organizational structure, the rest of her inquiry and collection of stories has exceptional freedom of movement within.

When these whirling meditations on chickens stop to discuss the historical shift from integrated farms into mass scale agricultural production, Squire muses on chicken and egg metaphors, sharing her own experience with the Cobb 700 (a brand, not a breed as Squier notes, which is marketed as “the chicken of the future”) and the more traditional bantam in her own back yard. Her ruminations do the work of placing our intimate worlds of farming and animal husbandry in a larger context.

It comes as no surprise then, that she finds our Nancy Luce as a useful character in her expansive discussion of chicken-y thinking. Luce appears a central subject of the “F” chapter, entitled “Fellow-Feeling.” Squier describes this affiliation as “A kind of empathy—born in the intimate encounters that are so much a part of chicken farming:...enjoying the variety of their sounds from soft clucks of contentment to urgent churnings when they turned up a worm… Fellow-feeling: the sense that my chickens are fellow creatures.”

Thanks to Dr. Squier’s work, I now consider the primer a breed of poetic form in itself in that it offers a flexible cohesion with enough room for a variety of diverse view points on a particular subject without the burden of maintaining one singular narrative, thus allowing for connections that are inspirational, rather than sheerly logical.

Author’s note: Consider Poor I: The Life and Works of Nancy Luce by Walter Magnes Teller, is due in re-print soon with support from the MV Historical Society.

Thank you to Susan Squier, the MV Historical Society, The Scottish Bakehouse, Flying Skunk Farm for inspiration–especially the live chicken coop web cam, and my folks for letting us do the funky chicken at their house.

Another augury

This morning, waiting for our friends to come over for meditation, suddenly we heard a racket in the front yard.  The older of our two roosters was standing out there, crowing his danger crow, alert and tall and alone. The hens were hidden in the foliage, except one hen who ran frantically to hide herself in response to his warning.  I ran out, in my socks, onto the wet grass, as a small hawk flew right across my view to perch in front of me in our tall pine tree. Hence the rooster's crowing.

This is why we have roosters, we said to each other: to keep the hens safe. And this, just before the weekend when we had decided both roosters had to go . . . .  They've ridden our hens so hard that several have no back feathers, and one has a bald head.

Pharmakon: that which cures but also kills; that which benefits but also harms.  Kill the rooster and cure the hens; kill the rooster, and cure the hens only to have the hawk kill them.  Practical ethics in the poultry yard.

spring changes

Listening to Magnetic Fields ("If there's such a thing as love.") and looking out at my chickens on a still-too-wintry morning, I realize that there are signs of spring even among the chickens.  It just takes a certain perspective to identify them.  Four of our hens now wear discrete green and grey camouflage saddles: we were forced to this by our three roosters, who have been taking their responsibilities so seriously that the hens were in danger of having their backs rubbed raw. (I leave it to the reader's imagination to figure out how that might happen).  Once there is raw skin then there can be a wound, and where there is blood, the pecking order swings into action. Chickens can be pecked to death by their fellows, all because they are hardwired to be drawn to (and curious about) the color red. It was actually quite a simple procedure. We decided to draw the line at actually sewing the saddles, though my chicken health handbook does have a pattern for them. (I realize others might have drawn the line a good bit earlier than we did!) Instead, we ordered them from an online site, and once we had them, we went into the hen house after dark to slip them, one at a time, over the hen's wings until they rested comfortably on her --- shoulders? ---leaving the wings to move freely.  Remarkably, the hens adjusted instantly to the saddle.  It's less clear that the roosters have. While I haven't seen one saddle get lost,  I also haven't (yet) seen one be used in its adapted equestrian function.  But that's one somewhat exotic sign of spring.

Another sign is less exotic: we have an Aracauna hen sitting on five different colored eggs, in the garden shed that we divided up to create a brooding space.  They are supposed to hatch tomorrow, when my graduate seminar in the Gender and Science: Reproduction class comes over, along with seven students from the Center for Reproductive Biology and Health (between the College of Agriculture and the Huck College of Biosciences) and their lab head, Professor Joy Pate.  My students shadowed Joy's students in the lab, or in the barns, or in the field, and tomorrow they will present the results of their shadowing to those they shadowed.  And then (I hope) there'll be the opportunity for conversation and feedback from the lab scientists.  What a great thing it would be to celebrate the event by having a hatch of chicks!

The final sign of spring for the hens and roosters will arrive in two weeks or so, though I ordered it yesterday.  They are getting a new hen house, made by our friends Stolzfus in Madisonburg. It's splendid: on stilts,with nesting boxes that open from the outside, a number of roosts, and windows for aeration. The plan is to shift the birds to this as their summer house, so that we can then clean and air out the winter house, and clean up (of all the scattered shavings from the hen house floor) and seed (with oats or some other edible cover crop) the land all around the winter house.  So: clean new home, another spring sign.

As my friend said to me, "So the obsession with chickens doesn't end when the book is published."  Absolutely, evidently, not.

A Tale of 2 Chickens, a President, and Her Mother - Postcards - The Chronicle of Higher Education

A case study to ponder

Imagine a university where the quirky love of chickens was part of the curriculum. Consider Pitzer, in California, and its president, Laura Trombley.

Although I have written on Virginia Woolf, while her focus is Mark Twain, we share a hermeneutics.

Not of the hermeneutics of suspicion (though we both suspect our object of concern is everywhere), nor the hermeneutics of faith (though we are definitely believers in our object's revelatory powers), nor even the hermeneutics of the subject (although we're both clearly prone to muddle the featherless bipeds of Plato and Diogenes).

No, we share the hermeneutics of chicken poop.  We've learned from Latour, moreover, and we know it's not a case of fact. Of course chicken poop exists: on our shoes and boots, on our walkways, and definitely on the occasional egg that we bring in from the nest in the evening.  No, for us, the hermeneutics of chicken poop is one of concern. What can it teach us, how do we learn it, from whom do we learn it, what is the importance of what we learn, and most of all why should we be open to learning it?

Take Laura Trombley's case study in the hermeneutics of chicken poop.  Pitzer has a chicken coop, near its organic garden, behind the student center. Let's stop here to savor the wisdom in this: chickens to fertilize the organic garden, organic garden to feed the students (body and mind), students to feed the chickens and in turn to feed themselves (mind and heart).  A visiting student (the messenger of wisdom from afar) emails President Trombley to tell her: Your chicken is sick.  Can Scripps students know what Pitzer students do not? President Trombley swings into action, and consults an expert--their resident 'chicken whisperer,' who reassures the President, and she in turn reassures the student, that it's a simple case of dropping feathers. (Diogenes' chicken approximating Plato's man?)

The Scripps student challenges President Trombley, who is after all not her President.  And she marshals facts to support of her case: two photographs taken at the scene of the coop, showing the runny butt of one chicken and the clean control butt of another hen. The hermeneutics of poop can now be employed, and President Trombley does so, at the staggering cost of one hundred dollars to "get the chicken fixed."

I draw two conclusions from this lovely story. Take it as a case study in knowledge production.  It teaches us a number of things worthy of our concern: listen to outsiders, don't always trust experts, and above all don't assume that colleges (and college presidents) are above dealing with things as messy, runny, and hard to define as chicken poop.

Then take it as a case study in the gendered production of knowledge. Note that the president and her outside informant are both women, women who trust each other and trust the evidence right in front of their eyes, even when it contradicts expert opinion. The president even trusts her mother not to embarrass her when she comes for campus visits. Instead, she welcomes her mother, even letting her see her office and her computer, where those two photographs of chicken butts are displayed.

President Trombley clearly feels no contradiction between her little girl past and her presidential present.  And why should she? She's comfortable with this foray into the hermeneutics of poop. As she tells her mother:"It's all part of being a college president."

Now if we can only get other college and university presidents to the same level of understanding. Just  as studying chicken poop is part of being a college president, so studying chickens, and organic gardens, and the messy uncategorizable knowledges and practices tying them together, should be part of being a college student. Okay, a quirky one.

My letter to the Chronicle

http://chronicle.com/article/A-Plea-for-the-Quirky/126185/
I am happy that the Chronicle published my letter protesting the closure of the Penn State STS program.  I'm sad, however, that to date it has had few comments and no perceivable effect on the fate of STS at my university.  I did, however, have a good conversation with a very committed and interesting young woman teaching STS, nearly as a one-woman show, at another university. I wish her all the best, and hope that together all of us can keep STS a viable option for education.  It's not just that we who teach in STS need it. The students in our colleges and universities need it.  In fact, in the wake of the Citizen's United decision,  our democracy needs it.

STS and chickens

Last night I had one of my recurring dreams. I discovered a barn full of chicks and chickens that were being terribly neglected: many of the chicks were dying or dead, and the chickens' feathers were matted and torn. Broken or frozen eggs lay buried in mounds of long-neglected bedding straw.

I spent a long time walking around the barn, gathering up the viable eggs, feeding the chickens that were still alive, and collecting the chicks and chickens that had died.

As I said, this is a recurring dream.  I have had it during the years I was working on Poultry Science, Chicken Culture, and I have usually understood it as a signal that I was neglecting my writing, or another message from deep in my own unconscious (and like all such messages, overdetermined.)

What happens if I follow my own advice, though, and consider that dream as an augury giving me early warning of the endangered state of interdisciplinary programs like our own STS program.  I've learned through keeping chickens that they do indeed come home to roost.  And yet what if the roost itself, and the building that shelters it and the chickens roosting there, have been abandoned?

The irony of time

How ironic and sad that my "STS book", Poultry Science, Chicken Culture, receives its first review while I am working flat out to persuade Penn State not to cancel the Program in Science, Technology and Society of which I am Acting Director. The kind of scholarship my book embodies is made possible by interdisciplinary programs like STS.  I have been nourished, sustained, made joyful by conversations and collaborations with the faculty and students (undergraduate and graduate) brought together in this generative community.

January 23, 2011

Conspicuously Unconsumed

Jean Pagliuso

For the scholar Susan Merrill Squier, Jean Pagliuso's chicken portraits balance "the aesthetic of fashion photography with the eye of a poultry breeder."

By Nina C. Ayoub

Pondering Poultry

Susan Merrill Squier answers the obvious question right away, in the introduction: Why chickens? Why, after mining biomedicine, reproductive technologies, radio culture, and, well, Virginia Woolf, did the scholar turn to fowl for her latest book, Poultry Science, Chicken Culture: A Partial Alphabet (Rutgers University Press)?

One reason is a certain "agricultural amnesia" in cultural studies, writes Squier, a professor of women's studies, English, and science, technology, and society at Pennsylvania State University. With its focus on the "metropolitan," she says, cultural studies has largely ignored agriculture's centrality to our lives, societies, landscapes, and geopolitics. She derides the "bunker mentality" in academe that "distinguishes farm culture from scholarly culture, the country from the city, the body from the mind, and life from theory. ... "

"I gave myself the holiday of curiosity," she writes. The result is a quirky mash of essays on chickens and the interplay of biology and culture that manages to blend all of Squier's interdisciplinary interests. She ranges freely, from takes on chickens as subjects of photography and exhibition, playwriting, film, and children's and other literature, to musings on such public-policy issues as risk management, the avian-flu scare, and the societal costs of industrial agriculture.

"Chickens are good to think with," writes the author—her own flock included.

To our benefit as readers, Squier ignores the counsel of E.B. White, writer, grammarian, chicken fancier: "Don't try to convey your enthusiasm for chickens to anyone else," advice he gave in an introduction to a 1944 poultryman's primer on chicken raising. Squier is sanguine. "I risk my own share of withering glances to admit that I am very partial to chickens—and what we can learn with them, from them, and about them."

At the time of writing, we find out, Squier's own flock numbered 34 hens of various breeds and "three splendid bantam Seabright roosters." Her brood, past and present, tracks busily through the book, adding pleasantly to the lore that leavens the theory.